Sprint Cup - Stewart Sonoma Preview

KANNAPOLIS, June 21, 2012: The Tony Stewart who streaked to a third
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series title in 2011 appears back in 2012.

Stewart, who won a record five races in last year’s Chase for the
Sprint Cup to clinch the championship in an epic battle with Carl Edwards,
is poised for another hot streak as the summer solstice begins. The driver
of the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing comes
into Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at the road course in Sonoma, Calif.,
with the momentum of consecutive podium finishes at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway
and Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn.

After back-to-back 25th-place finishes in the races beforehand –
May 27 at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway and June 3 at Dover (Del.)
International Speedway – Stewart has roared back to championship form
with a third-place effort June 10 at Pocono and a second-place run last
Sunday at Michigan.

Now Stewart comes to Sonoma, the first road-course stop on the Sprint
Cup tour. The other is Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International, which welcomes
the Sprint Cup Series in mid-August.

Both tracks force drivers to turn left and right, and both have suited
Stewart very well. Seven of his 46 career Sprint Cup victories have come on
road courses – two at Sonoma and five at Watkins Glen.

One could argue that Stewart is king of the road, for in addition to his
seven wins, the three-time Sprint Cup champion has 11 top-twos, 18 top-10s
and has led a total of 307 laps in 26 career road course starts. In fact,
with only four finishes outside the top-15, Stewart’s average
road-course finish is 9.3. At Sonoma alone, Stewart’s two wins (2001
and 2005) are augmented by one pole (2002), two second-place finishes, four
top-fives and eight top-10s.

Finishing up front has come in large part from Stewart starting up
front. In his 26 road course races, Stewart has started within the first
two rows 10 times, and he has qualified in the top-10 16 times.

Proving true the racing adage of, “To finish first, you must first
finish,” Stewart has recorded only one DNF (Did Not Finish) in all
his road-course starts, which came in last year’s race at Sonoma.
There, a dustup with Brian Vickers with less than 25 laps to go sent
Stewart from a seemingly surefire second-place result to a career-worst
39th-place road-course finish.

It was a rare blemish on what has become an impressive road-course
resume that isn’t limited to Sprint Cup. Outside of NASCAR’s
elite series, Stewart scored a road-course win in IROC. He won Round 3 of
IROC XXX on the Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway road course en route
to the series championship in 2006. Stewart has also competed in the
prestigious Rolex 24 Hours At Daytona five times, with a best finish of
third in 2005.

So, if you’re looking for a candidate this weekend who embraces
both the left and right turns of Sonoma, look no further than Stewart.

“I just like the road courses. I’ve always liked Sonoma.
It’s really a driver’s track. It’s tough to make your car
drive perfect all day. You can have a really good car, but it’s going
to slide around and you’re going to struggle for grip, and
that’s what makes it so fun. You have to do the work behind the
steering wheel.”

What does it take to win at Sonoma?

“You’ve just got to have a good handling car. Aerodynamics
are not the least bit important at Sonoma, which is great because
it’s one of the few tracks that we go to that we don’t have to
worry about aero balance or anything like that. It’s just a matter of
keeping a well-balanced car all day and having good pit stops and pit
strategy and staying out of trouble.

“A lot can happen at Sonoma. You’ve got to be patient all
day. You get a lot of cautions there and a lot of guys end up beating and
banging on each other. I mean, the cars look like they’ve been to a
race at Martinsville (Va.) because it’s a short road course. Save
that car for the last 20 laps because that’s the critical time. Do
what you have to do to get through the first 90 laps, but those last 20 are
the ones when you really have to go, and you need your car to be in one
piece to make it happen.”

You’ve won seven road course races altogether – two at
Sonoma and five at The Glen. Does success at one venue transfer to the
other?

“The two tracks, while both road courses, are still pretty
different. At Watkins Glen you don’t have to finesse the throttle
near as much as you do at Sonoma. When you get the car turned, you can get
in the gas and then stay in the gas. Watkins Glen is much faster than
Sonoma. I think there are the same amounts of passing opportunities, but
because of the speeds that you’re able to run at The Glen, brakes
become a much bigger factor than I think they are at Sonoma. It’s
pretty much a horsepower track. It just happens to be in the form of a road
course. Sonoma has a lot less grip in the racetrack. You have to really be
careful with the throttle there, and that puts more of the race in the
driver’s hands. If anything, Sonoma is probably more technical than
Watkins Glen because there’s hardly any time where you get a chance
to rest. You’re always either shifting or accelerating or braking or
turning or doing something. At Watkins Glen, at least on the frontstretch
and on the backstretch, there are three straightaways where you get a
little bit of time to take a break. Watkins Glen seems to be more in the
crew’s hands and the engine builder’s hands. Obviously,
there’s still a job that I need to do in the racecar, but I’m
relying on the equipment and the crew a lot more at Watkins
Glen.”

With all those wins, do you feel you have a better opportunity to win on
a road course than you do at some of the oval tracks?

“It’s definitely a place I feel like we’ve got the
potential to win, even before we make a single lap. We seem to have taken
to the road racing side of it fairly well and just have had good luck with
it. I don’t know that there’s a secret to it, necessarily. I
think a lot of it is that when we get to a road course, we look forward to
being there. There are some drivers that don’t look forward to the
road course races and we’re one of those teams that actually look
forward to it. We like the change in pace and we get to do something
different for a weekend. That’s something we always look forward to
and it kind of gets us boosted up for the weekend.”

Because road course racing is such a different discipline, how do you
approach it?

“I’ve just always liked it. I won a national championship
racing go-karts on road courses, so the concept of what it took to win
races on road courses wasn’t totally unknown to me, but driving cars
with suspension, and definitely driving cars that you had to shift,
that’s something that came relatively easy to me, and still comes
easy to me as far as knowing how to synchronize the gears without having to
use the help of the clutch. Even in the sports cars that I’ve driven
with guys who have driven road courses all their life, I’ve gotten
out of the car and the crew has torn the gearboxes apart and said that the
dog rings in my transmission look better than when those guys are done with
a transmission. There’s just something about the shifting side of it
that’s been really natural to me, and it’s fun. I like having a
different discipline to race on. I like having the opportunity to do
something twice a year that we don’t get a shot at doing very often.
I take the same amount of pride that someone like Ron Fellows or Scott
Pruett does when they come into a road course race. I take that same pride
in running well that they do in these cars. I don’t look at it from
the standpoint that it’s a negative weekend. I look at it as a
positive, that it’s something we enjoy and I feel like that gives us
a leg up on most of the guys we race with at these tracks.”

How much do you look forward to racing on the road courses?

“I love the two road courses. It’s nice because it kind of
breaks up the monotony of the season. We do the same thing every week and
it’s nice to have two road course races thrown in the mix that give
us a chance to do something a little bit off-center for all of us.
It’s kind of like the ‘Prelude’ with no dirt added,
unless you drive off, which a lot of us do. We still get a dirt aspect in
it, I guess.”

The following titles and media identifications are trademarks
owned by The Auto Channel, LLC and have been in continuous use
since 1987: The Auto Channel, Auto Channel and TACH all have
been in continuous use world wide since 1987, in Print, TV,
Radio, Home Video, Newsletters, On-line, and other interactive
media; all rights are reserved and infringement will be acted
upon with force.